The Black Monk

The recurring apparition at the center of the story: a monk in black, barefoot, gray-haired, with black eyebrows, first described by Kovrin as a folk legend he cannot recall the source of -- a mirage endlessly re-mirrored across the atmosphere for a thousand years, due to reappear on earth any day. Kovrin then sees the figure himself, first as a moving black column over the rye field, then seated beside him in conversation, in the park, at dinner, and finally at his deathbed in Sevastopol. The Monk tells Kovrin he is one of God's chosen, a genius whose heightened, ecstatic state -- akin to the visions of prophets, poets, and "martyrs to an idea" -- is the necessary cost of serving eternal truth, and that ordinary health and normalcy belong only to "herd people." The story never resolves whether the Monk is delusion (a symptom of the same consumptive illness that eventually kills Kovrin) or, within its own ambiguous logic, a kind of grace: Kovrin's dying vision of the Monk returns him to the ecstatic conviction of genius and happiness that his "cured," sane self in the middle chapters could never access.